Correspondence on Foreign Dreams
Letter to The Editor
I recently saw the ad in your latest issue calling for an experienced hallucinator. I am not a hallucinator, however, I believe that you will find the nature of my observations to be relevant to your publication. You see, I am an avid dreamer, in fact one may call that my only hobby. Though the real world provides me with much context in the interpretation of dreams, I am of the opinion that enough interest is paid to the real world as a whole by individuals who are not myself, freeing me to explore the sublime and the surreal. I take my little cassette recorder into each dream I undertake every night, and in the morning, awake to write them down on my red typewriter.
During a trip out west for business, I had the remarkable good fortune to spend a few days wandering in the desert. There, I collected the following dreams:
Dream One: Peach Springs, Hualapai Indian Reservation, Arizona
The dreams here were vast and dark. I was looking down into an open sky, eyes wide, much like staring deeply into a five-gallon bucket of ancient motor oil forgotten in the back of a run down junkyard. Were those stars above me? Or merely the reflectors on the sides of vast trains, uncountably long, stretching from horizon to horizon, above me, below me, weaving a vast web of ancient steel and flickering lights. No destination to go to, no train yard to leave from, just stretching the vast expanse between here, and there.
I awoke to waves of sunlight lapping the windows like water and wind rustling bare grass. I opened my window and smelled the sky.
Dream Two: Springdale, Utah
Surprisingly light and refreshing! Peaches fall into my outstretched hands, passed from mother to son to daughter and on again down the long generations. Never eaten, merely smelled. Their aroma tantalizing and floral. I am reminded of my father, standing over the sink at midnight, teaching his young son the joys of the freshest summer fruit. “This is a sink peach” he says, “we have to eat it over the sink or we’ll leave sticky trails all over the kitchen, and we can’t have that. Then people will see we have them, and then we have to share.” The peaches go and with them go the faint moment of reverie, but dreams fade and change fast here, and I soon find myself wandering ancient hallways of stone. My feet splash cold water, a fish jumps once, twice, and is gone under the waves of the ocean. I skip a stone. As it bounces over water, it sheds its peachy flesh and swims with its cousins. I awoke to a thunderstorm shaking the peaks and rattling the windows.
Spring had come to the desert.
Dream Three: Springdale, Utah
An infinite staircase. Ravel’s Bolero pumping out of junkyard speakers, cut paper figures. I think I saw this somewhere on television. Each person holds in their hand a little object, cut of the same paper they are made from. Some are simple, easy to understand. A paper doll, her clothes held on by tiny paper tabs - I listen closely to her voice. Her singing will ring in my ears until the final sleep, I think. Or it will pass with waking. Another woman holds a paper cup, flat, two dimensional. But in her hands it is full of something that I know in my heart to be tea. The tea in dreams is especially good, but I regret I am still incapable of drinking paper. I walk up the staircase for miles and miles, the objects becoming flowers with intense perfume, hats for little flat heads, glasses for flat eyes. Smiling, I turn around and wake.
I have walked off the covers, they lay rumpled on the floor. I brush my teeth and head out through a 60-degree morning, perfect and clear, for coffee & breakfast.
Dream Four: Overton, Nevada, The Valley of Fire
Ancient stone. Older than the hands of those that became the hands that became the hands that became humanity. I stand in the ancient hall, forged of cresting waves of rock in brutal sun and, I lift my little rock. With each strike, the black crust crinkles off, and the images I know are beneath it float to the surface. Not long now, more are freed with each strike. Men, bighorn sheep, spirals, rivers, rain. I write history into the rock, and in turn history is born around me. It is so simple, this act of creation. “If only,” I think to myself as again I heft my stone stylus, “if only I could remember how to do this when I wake!”
At that thought, in a hotel room, I open my eyes. Clouds cover the sky from horizon to horizon, the sunrise blotted out by the promise of rain in this drought-ridden farmland. Creation is forgotten, as we drive to the big city.
Dream Five: Las Vegas, Nevada
Dread. Pain. Frantic reaching for levers, frantic gyrations of hideous wheels. I have not seen a smile since I placed my bags in my hotel, and the dreams here show it. This city is a magnet for the waste dreams, the place for dreams to be crushed, ground into scrap under the roulette wheel of loss & sin. Somewhere in this claustrophobic flesh colored hallway a man is yelling, screaming, sobbing. Somewhere else is his partner. The halls are small, tight, collapsing, breathing? Is this the place that feasts on us? I dig my way to an exit, the walls soft and spongy, and rip the door open to the cold air of the dreams of city streets. I run and run and run, past street light and dive under a massive bridge. Drums beat in the air, bells ring, chime, fade away. Shivering under a bridge large enough to be a city block, I look behind me to see the place I have escaped. A massive grub lays on the desert ground. It writhes, lazily munching on planes landing on its back, rolling into its maw. Searchlights sweep the sky around it. “Welcome to Vegas baby” a bum behind me mutters in his sleep.
I awoke to bright sunlight in the hotel room window, none of which made it down the hotel lobby. The light, smell, and sound had never changed.
With that, my holiday was over, and I must return to the regrettably easy to misunderstand world we live each day in.
From a car, blazing north to the next city in the desert sun,
Alan Partridge, Foreign Dreams Correspondent.
P.S. If you should wish to reach me, leave a response in the place you found this letter. I travel much, but there are those who know me who can ensure it gets to its proper location.
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